


Fill in the Blanks

by Amy R (Brightknightie)



Category: Forever Knight
Genre: Amnesia, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e07 Hearts of Darkness, Episode: s03e10 Night in Question, Gen, Hope, Memories, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-28 06:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19806955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brightknightie/pseuds/Amy%20R
Summary: What if Urs walked into Nick and Lacroix's "Night in Question" tag scene?





	Fill in the Blanks

_“Hope is the second soul of the unhappy.” — Goethe_

_Toronto, Fall 1995_

“Thank you!” Urs called over her shoulder to the bus driver, who replied with his usual wave. But the route had run late. Almost too late. The rising sun chased Urs down the sidewalk. She flipped up the collar of her beige coat, buried her hands in her pockets, and lengthened her stride. The Raven was just ahead.

To her surprise, Urs passed a familiar vintage car at the curb. Surely Nick wasn’t here at this hour? After the Ellen — Monika — Jacqueline incident, Nick and Urs had talked, starting a conversation that reached deeper each time she saw him. And she’d started to make a point of seeing him. Urs had thought Nick had no use for... She didn’t have time to wonder. She reached for the nightclub’s front door.

It didn’t budge.

“Of course.” By dawn, the sign was dark and all entrances locked. Lacroix disapproved of stragglers. Urs fought the panic rising with the sun. She ran around the corner, to the emergency exit by the dumpster. Fire regulations required that this door always open out from the inside. But, outside, it had no handle. Urs steeled herself. Then she dug her fingers into the brick beside the metal plate and pulled with more than mortal strength. The door swung easily open and closed. Safe inside, in a recess lit only by an “Exit” sign, Urs leaned against a wall and put her bruised and bloodied fingers in her mouth.

If she were going to use her vampire powers, she could have just flown in the first place. Javier had warned her about taking side gigs. Now, healing, she was hungry. Hungrier than she would otherwise have been. Maybe if she ignored it, it would go away.

Hah. That was a wish too far, even for Nick. And Nick hoped wider and deeper than Urs had ever imagined. Nick hoped to become human again. To stand in the sun. To live before dying.

Nick’s hopes dazzled Urs. She’d started building hopes of her own. Which is how she’d ended up late this morning...

Urs headed across the dark floor toward the back stairs, her bunk, and a bottle she’d stashed there — a bottle she’d budgeted to last longer than it now would. A voice drifted, faintly, from the club’s main counter, where some lights were still on. Was that Lacroix? So long after his nightly radio broadcast? The staff always left a bottle and a single glass on the bar for him, after closing up. Urs stepped more softly.

Then came a rich laugh in a second voice. Nick’s voice.

Urs froze.

“You are not the first of our kind to have suffered amnesia,” Lacroix was saying. 

Urs’s eyes widened.

“Indeed, Nicholas, physical injuries, like your head-wound, are the simpler case. For a time after such trauma — a brief window, swiftly closing on you now, I fear — where brain tissue that encoded a particular memory was destroyed, the blood of one who shares that memory can reinstate it.”

“Like you?” Nick asked.

Urs thought she could hear Nick’s slanting grin. His tone reassured her. He sounded like himself. Yet: amnesia! Like how Ellen hadn’t known Monika, and Monika hadn’t known Jacqueline? Or like a word that escaped you, just out of reach, until the right connection brought it home?

“Yes, myself,” Lacroix replied. “Or Janette, of course.” He sounded scrupulously fair. “If only she were here. Pity that neither of us knows where she is in this moment of need. It rather limits your options as this clock counts down. Today may be your last chance.”

“You said physical injuries are simpler. Simpler than what?”

Gliding silently on her toes, Urs started for the stairs again. She’d visit Nick. Soon. Tonight. When she’d seen his car, she’d wondered what could keep him at the Raven when he’d have to spend the day. And Lacroix ... had made Nick a vampire. If Nick chose to share, she’d let him know she’d been here. If not, she respected boundaries.

“Simpler than the psychological, of course,” Lacroix said. “Our kind are creatures of instinct. Should our natural inclinations be suppressed, unhealthy states can emerge. Blackouts. Delusions. Despair. I am sorry to have to tell you this, Nicholas, but such has long been your particular ... cross ... to bear. You have often struggled with hallucinations of change. But I can help you. You know that, even now, I trust? I have ... always ... helped you.”

Urs’s steps lagged. Looking out from the darkness, through a chain curtain, across the floor, she could see the men now, at the bar of the empty club: Lacroix seated, Nick standing, both in black. Lacroix held a glass of wine-cut blood. Nick’s coat was draped over the counter.

“Natalie’s work isn’t hallucination.”

“Oh, Nicholas. The good doctor means well. But her task is impossible. Doesn’t the feeling that brought you here tell you that? You are naturally, eternally a vampire. Predator. Killer.” Lacroix’s voice grew quiet, reeling in his listeners. “I have watched you hunt and catch and slaughter. I have fed at your side and on your quarry. You are what I am. You are finding this in your returning memories, are you not? The pieces settle into place. They make you whole. And you really do ... like ... it. You always will.”

Silence sat heavy.

“You may be right.”

“No!” Urs reacted. She felt like she had when she’d reached out and grabbed Monika’s arm weeks ago. Impulse drove her away from the back wall onto the club floor. “No. Nick, he’s wrong.”

“Urs.” Lacroix frowned. “I believe my tenants have a curfew.”

“I’m sorry.” Urs briefly met Lacroix’s eyes. Annoying her landlord and primary employer was stupid. Defying this ancient vampire should terrify her. “I didn’t plan to overhear.”

“Yet you did. How much?”

Urs dropped her gaze but walked closer. “Nick, don’t let anyone tell you you’re like the rest of us. You’re not!”

“Oh, I agree. Nicholas is like no other.” Lacroix sipped from his glass. “For example, Nicholas has a key...”

“Drop it, Lacroix.” Nick looked concerned. “Urs, did you just now get in?” 

Urs raised her head and nodded firmly. Her coat showed that she’d been either coming in or going out. If Nick remembered, he could worry that she’d been headed into the sun. She’d come a long way in recent weeks, but that thought never wholly left her. “Late from rehearsal.”

“Oh?” Lacroix looked from Nick to Urs and back. He set his glass on the counter. “I’m so glad that you’re well enough to identify past informants, Nicholas. Or is it former suspects? Regardless, such progress merits a toast.” Lacroix stood to retrieve two more glasses from the rack overhead. Filling all three from his bottle, he held one out to Urs and swirled the liquid in its bowl. “Join us.”

Urs stepped forward. Her fangs dropped; her eyes may have glowed. The smell announced a better grade of blood than she could afford.

Catching herself, Urs blinked hard and covered her mouth with her hand, hoping Nick hadn’t seen. She envied his clarity of conscience, giving up human blood. She didn’t like to remind him that she hadn’t done the same.

Nick’s eyes narrowed. “Are you hurt?” He crossed to her, arm extended.

“What? Oh.” Use looked at her fingers for the first time since she’d pried open the exit. No longer bloody, but still raw and rough. No wonder she’d lost control. She started to hide her hand in a pocket. “It’s nothing, really.”

Nick caught her wrist, gently. He frowned at the damage.

“It just happened,” Urs said. “I’ll be fine.”

Lacroix tapped the glass in his hand with a fingernail. “We have the sovereign specific. Come and be healed ... both of you.”

Nick drew Urs with him to Lacroix at the bar. Each took a glass.

“To Nicholas’s health.” Lacroix raised his glass. “Least said, soonest mended,” he added, pinning Urs with his gaze.

Urs felt trapped. She craved this connoisseur special, this almost fresh, barely adulterated, death-throes blood, so far from the expiring donations that usually came within her means and conscience. But seeing it in Nick’s hands felt like finding the front door locked.

Lacroix drank first. His expression ordered Urs to do the same.

Yet when Nick lifted his glass, she set hers on the bar and caught his wrist, gently, as he had hers. “You don’t want that. I mean, of course you want it, but if you remembered--”

“Even while I’m recovering?” Nick smiled wistfully and set his glass next to hers. “No, you’re right. I know you’re right. I just wish I could connect how I know it.”

“And that is why you need blood now,” Lacroix said. “Today. This and ... more. After you’re fully ... restored ... will be time enough for philosophical vagaries.”

Urs chewed her lip and thought hard. Nick deserved to remember. She couldn’t help him the way that Lacroix could. But it didn’t sound like Lacroix knew the Nick she did. Nick had told her...

Nick said, “I believe that the Raven does stock animal blood.”

“You’re not a carouche, Nicholas.” Lacroix sighed. “Yes, we have some such put away. If you’ll come with me, Urs can take this bottle with her downstairs, and you and I can resume the conversation for which you came — about ... all ... of who you are.”

“Erica!” Urs burst out when the name came to her. She looked at Nick. “You just said, you wished you could connect. Your friend Erica, the playwright, who walked into the sun. Do you remember?”

Nick cocked his head.

“You told me about her when Ellen died. How she thought she was a burden. But that she was wrong. It wasn’t only that you mourned her. You said it came from thinking she could make a balance when she never stopped killing.” Urs tried to remember how Nick had put it. “You said, you wished you’d been able to tell her, you’d never felt such despair as the last time you killed on purpose, and never such hope as when found you could live without it.”

Lacroix and Nick were both frowning at her.

Urs’s heart sank. She’d blown it. Nick didn’t remember. She couldn’t help him find his way back to himself. Lacroix would lead him to some other understanding, Lacroix’s understanding, and the Nick she’d just started to know would be lost. Urs blinked away tears and crossed her arms. “Anyway, that’s how you know you don’t want human blood on your hands.”

“A pretty story...”

“That’s right,” Nick said. “I remember telling you. We were at my place.” His eyes seemed to look inward, unfocused. “I remember remembering Erica as we talked. I remember her. It’s like each memory pulls in another.” He smiled. “Thank you.”

Lacroix drained his glass and set it between Nick’s and Urs’s on the bar. “It is indeed kind of Urs to fill in what she can. Why, you’ve known each other for ... weeks. Tell us, Urs, what else does Nicholas need to know about himself?”

Urs wanted Nick to be the man she’d spoken to just days ago, who’d inspired her to think that she, too, could change in her own ways. She understood that Lacroix wanted Nick to be the vampire he’d been in centuries long gone, rolling back all his hard-earned changes.

“Nick’s a homicide detective with the metro police,” Urs tried. “He paints and plays piano. His best friend, Natalie, is a scientist. He was close to the Raven’s last owner, Janette. He works with that policewoman Javier can’t hypnotize.”

Lacroix’s smile made Urs feel small.

She turned to Nick. “For a long time, you tried to kill only the guilty. In 1890 — the year Javier brought me across — you stopped killing altogether. You said, you realized that we — vampires — we’re the guilty. They’re the innocent. Do you remember telling me that?”

“No,” Nick shook his head. “That sounds right... I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Urs tightened her crossed arms. She’d listened hard when they’d talked, and held his words close to her heart, but she was failing him. “You want to be human again. And you’re trying to make up for what you’ve done, not by balance, not like your friend Erica, but like — like, go and sin no more. Serve God in your fellow men.”

“Enough!” Lacroix’s voice whipped over her. “This is farce.”

“Not tragedy?” Nick’s tone raised a shield.

“We must not waste these last precious hours of your recovery, when you can still receive intact that which has been lost.” Lacroix poured himself more wine-cut blood. “I promise you, Nicholas, if you accept in time, I can ensure the reconstruction of your missing memories. If you depend on ... others ... you may or may not ever find them.”

Urs opened her arms. “Nick, if you want me to go on downstairs, I will. What do _you_ want?”

Nick’s smile made Urs feel brave.

“I have a proposal,” Lacroix said. “Who can help Nicholas more? The other must yield. I will wager, ten to one, from the years of Nicholas’s eternity. Urs, if you can demonstrate your utility to Nicholas by filling in ten years for him — any ten consecutive years from his eight hundred — I will give way for the day. The floor will be yours. And you may continue your residence downstairs despite your vagrancy.” His voice chilled. “If you cannot, but I can fill in a hundred, you will hold your tongue and leave not just the Raven, but Toronto, at sunset.”

“Why should Urs agree to that?” Nick snorted. “Why would I?”

“I gave you a choice eight centuries ago, Nicholas. You agreed then. As for Urs... you know the stakes, don’t you, my dear?”

Urs stared. She’d acted on impulse. She didn’t know anything. But if Lacroix feared her enough to challenge her, that meant he thought she would, should, could stop him.

Ten years in a row? Urs ran through everything Nick had shared with her. There was no way.

She chewed her lip. They were stuck in Lacroix’s club until sundown. Lacroix wouldn’t just let Nick go. If she declined to play Lacroix’s game, she wouldn’t have to move on before she was ready, but she’d abandon Nick to Lacroix’s persuasions. If she tried and failed, she’d be on her own, too soon, in the worst way, and Nick would be no better off — except, he’d know she’d tried for him?

Nick had stood up to Lacroix for centuries. He didn’t have to play Lacroix’s game, either. He’d be fine!

Before, though, he’d always known who he was, and why.

Nick said, “This isn’t what I came here for.”

“What did you come for, Nicholas? Surely not only my invitation. Did you come in expectation, drawn by the feeling — the fact — that we are so much ... more? Because we are. And you should.”

“You said I should discover myself for myself.”

“Did I? And what have you discovered?” Lacroix sniffed. “If a mere decade is too much to ask, does that not make the case? Time is wasting.”

Urs watched the men size each other up. Nick might know the borders of despair as well as she did. Lacroix, she suspected, had never come close.

What if she were pitched back in time to Lemieux, not knowing who she now wanted to become, and, more, if Lemieux had been the one to make her a vampire? That was what Lacroix was to Nick, Urs thought. The only way out had been death.

“Not ten in a row,” she found herself saying. “I help Nick find his memories of ten years, period. Any ten. Your hundred would have to be consecutive.”

Lacroix inclined his head. “Agreed.”

“Urs, let it go,” Nick said. “There’s nothing to gain here.”

Urs shook her head. Maybe she did know the stakes. Nick needed enough of who he’d become to withstand who he’d been. “I’m pretty sure there’s something to lose.”

“When you’re ready,” Lacroix said.

Nick leaned against the bar. “She should get to count the year Erica died — and my years with Erica. Urs’s already helped me remember those.”

“If you believe the most distinctive feature of that year was Erica’s loss, Nicholas, then Urs has not satisfactorily restored that year to you.”

“Erica died the year I killed you.”

“Tried to kill me. Granted. That’s one.”

“1890,” Urs said. “The year you stopped killing altogether.”

Lacroix tapped the counter. “We’ve established that he doesn’t recall that.”

Urs ignored Lacroix. “Nick, you told me that after the last time you killed on purpose, you thought you wanted to die. You said, you were starving, scorched, losing your mind, when a friend found you. He dragged you to his country house, and watched over you while you worked through to no more killing ... and he made you help in his gardens.”

“Feliks!” Nick’s recognition lit and then blew out. He sank onto a bar stool. Pain rolled off him. “ _Sylvaine_.”

Lacroix’s eyes narrowed. “Two.” His expression battered Urs.

Urs began to pace across where tables were sometimes set to keep the dance floor crowded. She repeated what Nick had told her about moving to Toronto; when Nick replied with baseball and pipe bombs, Lacroix snorted and counted, “Three.” She put together some remarks by Nick with some gossip at the Raven; when Nick recalled a portrait, Lacroix grudgingly credited both “Four” and “Five.” She described the first time Nick had heard a piano in concert; beaming, Nick began retelling the story himself, and Lacroix cut him off with, “Six.” Though Nick hadn’t told her, Urs had figured out that he was one of the detectives who had solved the asteroid hoax the year before; Nick and Lacroix shared a long look, and Lacroix granted “Seven.” Similarly, Urs had found out that Nick had helped solve the mayoral election murders two years before that, saving at least one life.

Nick joked, “Did you get Merlin to hack my annual reviews?”

“People talk.” Urs spread her hands.

“You should move on soon, Nicholas,” Lacroix said. “In any case, that incident was the same year as my supposed demise. Try again.”

“You were on the Titanic,” Urs said confidently.

“Was I?” Nick shook his head. “I remember movies about that. Books. Newspapers. Would newspapers count?”

Lacroix drew down his eyebrows. “No.”

Urs took a deep breath. She’d saved this. Maybe she should have started with it. “You knew Joan of Arc. The Joan of Arc. You spoke with her three times. You still have a cross she gave you — in a box. You usually can’t touch it, you said, but sometimes, just sometimes, since you’ve worked with Natalie...”

Nick stared back. He looked shellshocked. “‘ _The faith you’ve lost is always there to regain_.’” After a while, Nick stood and crossed to Urs. “I followed Joan on the road from Domrémy when she was just some girl, a night’s prey, I thought. At the other end, when her campaign failed, I wanted to bring her over. Save her life. She wouldn’t let me. Later— later, I saw her die.”

“That’s eight, nine, and ten,” Urs said. “We win.”

“No,” Lacroix smiled. “You don’t. And if Nicholas doesn’t know why you don’t, you’re even further from your goal.”

Nick grimaced. “Joan was martyred the same year that I offered to make her a vampire.”

“Indeed.” Lacroix sipped from his glass. “So, eight and nine. You’re very close. Continue.”

Urs’s mind went blank. Saint Joan has been her ace card. Her last card. Urs tried to think. Nothing came.

Nick took her hand. He looked understanding. Would he still understand when Lacroix was through with him? She’d done her best.

“No?” Lacroix asked briskly. “My turn.”

Lacroix began in 1228, the year he’d brought Nick across; he lingered on Nick’s first feeding, first kill, as a vampire. Then 1229, when Nick, visiting his family home, had murdered people who knew him, while lying to his mother and hypnotizing his sister. Then 1230... Lacroix didn’t always name the years, but the sick expression on Nick’s face made clear that Lacroix was reeling off his century with meticulous positioning of the sins that pained Nick most. People hurt. Pleasure taken in hurting. What his own nephew witnessed, and what that did to him...

Urs had never taken death lightly. Nick had.

Urs held Nick’s hand more tightly as she felt him shrink from her. Yet Lacroix was laying out just one century of Nick’s eight. Year after year. Horror after horror. Urs clung to the change she knew in Nick. He had changed. She could change.

Still, it went on. Another murder. Another atrocity.

Urs could see Nick sinking under the weight Lacroix was piling on him.

“Enough,” Nick choked. “No more. You win, Lacroix. Urs shouldn’t have to hear this.”

“It’s okay, Nick.”

“No.” He squeezed her shoulder and withdrew his hands. “I can’t. This is so far beyond you—”

“I’m a vampire, too, you know.”

“Of course you are,” Lacroix said. “Yet why persist to the bitter end? I will win. Yield now, leave Nicholas with me, and I’ll release your bond to depart Toronto. Stay with the Spainiard, if you like.”

Urs looked from Lacroix to Nick. The air was thick with pain. It would be easy to step away. Nick was telling her to step away. She’d given all she had. She had nothing else to offer.

Nothing ... except what Lacroix also had?

“It’s not the memories,” Urs breathed.

Her model of hope had been pushed to the edge of despair.

Urs smiled at him. Reassuringly. Recklessly. She had let Ellen jump; she would not let Nick. No longer hearing Lacroix, Urs used a fingernail on her left hand to open her right wrist. She extended her bleeding arm to Nick. “I believe in you.”

Nick took her arm between his hands. His eyes blazed golden and his nostrils flared, but he kept his lips sealed across his teeth.

“Believe in yourself,” Urs said.

Slowly, carefully, Nick lifted Urs’s arm. He turned it.

And then he kissed the back of her hand, her now-healed fingers, his eyes clear and blue and bright.

“Ario,” Nick said to Lacroix. “He shared that Spanish jail cell with us during the Inquisition. Do you remember? Or Sister Marise, who hid me in a French convent’s storage cellar, until you came? Or Mai Chung, behind a San Francisco opium den, during the First World War?”

“What is your point, Nicholas?”

“Everyone who ever tried to save me — I remember them. Urs brought them back to me. She wins.”

Lacroix leaned forward. “Then take the gift she offers you. Absorb her ... truth ... instead of mine.”

Urs nodded. She meant him to.

“Truth isn’t negotiable.” Nick kissed Urs’s forehead and returned her hand. His tender, wistful expression made her feel more than if he had taken her blood. “You’ve both shown that my memories aren’t gone. They don’t need replacing. They need retrieving. Everyone who helped me, everyone who thought I was worth saving, they deserve that and more. I will remember them. I’ll work toward what they hoped.”

Lacroix’s expression tightened.

“We should still talk.” Nick spread his hands. “Over that cow blood?”

“Very well.” Lacroix looked at Urs, and then back at Nick. “Join me in my office when you’re ready. Bring your second, if you must.” He strolled across his club, head high.

Behind him, Urs and Nick stood, silent. Urs wanted to apologize, to ask what came next, to learn all about this injury and what Nick had been going through. To explain about the band she’d joined and the bus being late. And that she would never walk into the sun while he needed her. But, except when she was singing, she was no good with words.

Urs reached out.

They pulled each other into a hug. Held on tight. And hoped.

**— end —**

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer.** This is fanfiction of _Forever Knight_. Please don’t mistake it for anything else. (Emergency exit doors exist. Vampires don’t.)
> 
> **Beta-reading.** Many thanks to Skieswideopen! Given only a little time, she identified sentences to untangle and plot points to solidify, and she did so with insight, skill, and cheerful reassurance. This story is better for her kind help!
> 
> **Inspiration.** In the 2019 FKFicFest game — our tenth — we addressed the common challenge prompt “10 years.” I lined that up with “Night in Question” and my fondness for Nick/Urs ... and for disrupting third season.
> 
> **Canon.** Nick’s amnesia is in “Night in Question.” Urs first meets Nick in “The Black Buddha, Part 2.” The Ellen|Monika|Jacqueline episode is “Hearts of Darkness,” which has our only Urs flashback; this story posits that Urs and Nick begin their friendship then. It’s “Trophy Girl” that shows that Urs recognizes Tracy, and “Ashes to Ashes” that Urs stays at the Raven, knows where Nick lives, and is perhaps not an unfamiliar visitor. Three of the memory references are made-up allusions to canon (e.g. what Feliks did); the rest are fully canonical (e.g. what Erica did); many quote from their episodes. Would you like a list? :-D
> 
> **Thank you for reading!** Please let me know what you think. How can I do better next time?


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